Where is the ID on the Search page results?

Billion Graves volunteer

Sometimes I search for a name and find the exact person I want, but it has no ID attached to it. It was from Find A Grave invariably. When I click on the person's name, it takes me to the information about that person, but nowhere is there a Family Search 7-digit ID that I can use. Please help me find a way to connect these people that I know are the right ones, but they are not connected on anyone's family tree yet so I can't find an ID for them.

Billion Graves volunteer

Thank you, Julia, you are on the right track to helping me find a solution, if there is one. The first picture you posted is a good example of the problem for me. Ignoring the name that has the family tree symbol attached, look at the name below (which happens to be the same person, but in my cases it never is). If you were to click on the name below, and there is no other duplicate in the system, is there a way to find an ID number?

Conversely, is there a number assigned for those names?

Thanks for your answer. I do understand what you said above.

Connie

Gordon Collett

@Billion Graves volunteer Please allow me to explain what I think you are asking, saying the same thing as Julia but in a slightly different way, because there is an important point here you might not be totally clear over.

The FamilySearch website consists of several independent, interrelated parts. Two of these are the historical record databases and Family Tree. You can picture the historical record databases as a stack of documents:

And Family Tree as a single, huge, multi-dimensional, interlinked pedigree chart in which every entry has that unique 7-digit ID number:

The historical records database and Family Tree can be associated in three ways.

1) A user of Family Tree can have attached a historical record as a source to a Family Tree individual.

In this case, the historical record will appear on the person's Source page and the person's ID number will appear on the historical record entry.

2) No user may have ever attached the record in the source:

Since it has not been attached, the historical record does not appear on the person's source page. There is no ID number on the historical record information because no user has never assigned that record to a person. The only way to find the ID number for the person is to take the information in the historical record and use the Search by Name function of Family Tree to find the correct person in Family Tree, not just someone of the same name, by doing sufficient research to be absolutely certain you have found the right person, then attach the historical record to place the person's ID on the historical record information. With one exception that I won't go into here, none of this connecting historical records to Family Tree individuals is automatic. It is done one record at a time by the users of Family Tree.

3) The person in the historical record database may never have been created in Family Tree:

In this situation, you can search all you want and never find in ID number, because there is no ID number. The person does not exist in Family Tree. This is probably true for the vast majority of historical records in the databases. I just checked and one online source claims about 10 billion people were born between 1650 and 1950. Family Tree only contains about 1.4 billion people and ranges from something BC to the current day. So a horribly inaccurate estimate would be to say that probably far less than 10% of the records in the historical record databases have a corresponding person in Family Tree. The other 90% of records will need to have Family Tree records created for them some day. Again, there is nothing automatic about this. This is done one person at a time primarily by their descendants and other relatives who are users of Family Tree.

So to get back to your question of how do you "connect these people that I know are the right ones, but they are not connected on anyone's family tree yet so I can't find an ID for them"?

You use the Find function under Family Tree and using the information in the historical record you look, and look, and look for the person in Family Tree. You may need to use other historical records found on FamilySearch or other websites to learn more about the person. You may need to find obituaries, census records, birth records, newspaper articles, or other records to learn all you can about the person then look in Family Tree again to find the right person to connect the source to. Or when you are convinced you know all about the person and that person is just not in Family Tree, you create a new entry for the person including everything you have learned about that person including everything about the person's extended family so that you create that 7-digit ID. Then attach all the sources you have found to that Family Tree record so the ID is on the historical records for the next person who runs across it and wants to find the person in Family Tree.

Please be aware that it is not really helpful for anyone to just create an isolated, unconnected, free floating individual using only the information in a single historical record to create a Family Tree entry. That just leads to duplication and confusion in the tree. The goal with Family Tree is to have every person that has ever existed have a single Family Tree record and be completely and correctly connected to parents, spouse and children in one huge network of family.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

I think you must be conflating two rather different parts of FamilySearch: indexed historical records versus Family Tree profiles.

If an indexed record has been attached as a source to a Family Tree profile, this fact is shown in the search results list with a little tree-stublet icon, and on the index entry's page with the "Attached in Family Tree to..." message at the top of the right-hand column.

If the record has not yet been attached as a source, but the hinting system has found a potential match, this also shows at the top right of the index entry's page.

This part of the hinting system is pretty picky, though; in my observation, it pretty much only finds profiles that match the index word-for-word. My great-grandmother was (recently) misindexed as male, for example, so there's no "Possible Family Tree Match" for her.

I can attach the record to her profile by clicking the big blue button and putting her profile ID in the box.

To get the ID, in this case I just went to my fan chart and copied it, but I could have used "Find", which is accessible two ways from the top menu: Family Tree - Find, or Search - Family Tree.

Billion Graves volunteer

Thank you so much to Julia and Gordon for explaining this to me. I get it now. I did search further and found the person under a different name spelling.

I understand the need to make sure the people aren't duplicated. I will go and do the things you taught me. Thank you!

Connie Curtis